1. Field of Invention
The present invention is related to secure data storage and restoration. The invention is yet more particularly related to data storage/backup at facilities that are not necessarily secure, such as secondary storage facilities outsourced to third parties. The invention is also related to encryption, security and backup of encryption algorithms, keys, and other storage related information, and restoration of encrypted off-site stored back-up data.
2. Discussion of Background
Data storage systems are common in all levels of modem business and personal enterprises. Maintaining data storage that is easily recoverable upon a failure is a necessity. Proprietary information, trade secrets, financial information, accounting, personal data, and other important records are all maintained electronically. Loss, corruption, or theft of that information is unacceptable and is potentially economically disastrous. To protect against such loss, a number of data storage solutions have been developed and implemented.
Many of those solutions rely upon transfer of the data, on a periodic basis, from the main data storage facility to some form of storage medium for protective custody elsewhere. The protective custody is often off-site at a second party and may be managed by a third party. The protective custody is often accessed over a network, and data owners often have little or no control over physical and/or electronic security measures implemented by the second and third parties.
“Remote copy” is one of the technologies available for replicating data at a remote storage facility. When employed, this technology will perform a data transfer from the main or local storage facility to the remote storage facility each time data is written and/or updated to a storage device of the local facility. However, remote copy, and other current implementations of backup and restore technologies have many problems in the areas of security and management of recovery.